


The White Room

by JoAsakura



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-07
Updated: 2013-11-07
Packaged: 2017-12-31 18:54:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1035221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoAsakura/pseuds/JoAsakura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the shouting is over, a white room, a rabbit, and a whole lot of questions</p>
            </blockquote>





	The White Room

He awoke with a start, a panicked grasp at his chest waiting for the pain of his unmaking: the blue burn as the man he’d been flaked away like ash reborn like a phoenix in the embrace of his gardners, the green as everything he had been and ever would be unspooled and re-embroidered the very fabric of life in some new image, or the red pain shredding his flesh like knives and regret, blood a dull black puddle in the light.

And all of them, all of them - Kaidan’s sad smile, three freckles above his eyebrow, the friction of stubble against his throat as they kissed, biotic sparks dancing between them, eyes like sunlight through whiskey sweet and burning - Always there in those last thoughts.

All of them rushed through his mind, and as he sat up in the white room, unmarked and whole, Shepard blinked.

White bed, with white linens. A white table with a pitcher of water and a glass. White curtains waving in a breeze from some window that opened out into a white nothing.

Draped across a chair, a set of fatigues and his hoodie - stark black, as if they were the only thing real in the room. He took a long, deep breath and started to assess his situation.

"Ah, good, Commander Shepard, you’re awake. Thank you for your service." A voice said, suddenly at his other side. It was perfectly calm, utterly soothing and had absolutely none of the desired effect.

"какого хуя?!" Shepard spat, a short charge hop off the bed and across the room, the boom scattering the furniture. The moves were pure muscle memory as he rolled to his feet, grabbing the pitcher with his biotics to use as a weapon.

Then he paused, scowling at the speaker. The being was blurry, indistinct - and it had no real face to speak of. Rather, it seemed to be trying on every face in Shepard’s memory all at once, and the effect was unsettling as bits of turian, krogan and asari all competed with human and elcor and quarian.

“Иван Иванович… Пожалуйста, успокойтесь" It said in that same placid voice, finally settling on a six-foot anthropomorphic rabbit in a simulacrum of Shepard’s hardsuit. "пришло время для приключений!" it added with a vague attempt at excitement.

"Annnnd…Commander Cosmobunny." He blinked and set the pitcher down. "Right. Great. Where am I?"

The creature’s ears drooped slightly. “We thought perhaps a beloved image from your childhood might put you more at ease.” Commander Cosmobunny said, offering Shepard his clothes. “As would your most commonly worn items of clothing. Do you prefer Ivan Ivanovich or John Doe, as your Alliance service record reads? It varies sometimes, I’ve noticed.”

"Just Shepard is fine. And none of this is real, is it." Shepard said, taking his pants from a giant talking rabbit in a hardsuit. It was no weirder than the thorian, he supposed, resigned.

"Well, it is as real as you make it.” The rabbit said. “And for what you choose to do after this.”

"I’m dead, aren’t I?" Shepard said after a moment, hugging himself in the worn fleece of his jacket. "I died on the Citadel."

"In an infinite number of worlds, sometimes you die, sometimes you live, and sometimes you become something new." The rabbit said. Shepard realised they’d been walking, but the room never seemed to end. "It is always the fate of the Eternal Champion."

"The what, now?" Shepard dug a hand into his pocket, rubbing the back of his neck with the other.

"Oh, that’s right. You Shepards never know." The rabbit shook its head. "You’d think I’d know that by now."

"Shepard **s**.”

The rabbit paused and opened a door that had not been there a moment before and the wind nearly blew them both back. What seemed like an infinite number of pages rippling past them. “The multiverse.” The Rabbit made a grand gesture, ears drooping again when Shepard just stared blankly at it. “Well, not *really* the multiverse, but this is how your brain is choosing to interpret it.”

"Like an infinite stack of paperwork?" Shepard quirked an eyebrow at the creature.

"Like an infinite PAD of paper. On one sheet, at the very very beginning, is a universe entirely made of chaos. As you can imagine, it’s quite the mess. And on the other end of the infinite number of layers, one made entirely of order. Dull, let me tell you something."

"And in between?" Shepard reached out, and the rabbit slapped his hand away.

"In between, we try to keep everything balanced. That’s where you Champions come in. When things go out of whack, you fix them. Some have a black sword. You had a black widow sniper rifle. Interesting choice, by the way."

"The reapers. " Shepard ignored the rabbit, thinking. "The reapers were trying to keep balance between organics and synthetics in their own way." He grunted. "But.."

"But they would eventually become tools of total order, and eventually, no new life would grow in your galaxy and then another, and another." The rabbit nodded. "Eventually, your whole universe would stagnate and die."

"You said there was more than one Shepard." He said, still watching the pages ripple past.

"Some universes are very much like each other. Tiny little differences. Some start off the same, then branch off into their own. There’s a whole pile of them that are very similar here - and all of them have a Commander Shepard. Sometimes a woman, sometimes a man. You start off in so many places, but you almost always end up stopping the reapers."

"Did I stop them?" Shepard asked in a small voice. "We sacrificed so much."

"Yes." The rabbit put a fluffy paw on his shoulder. "Yes you did." It said kindly. "You did good, child."

"So. So what happens next?" Shepard finally looked away from the endless scene beyond the door. "Where do I go? I … I told Kaidan I’d be waiting for him. Uhm. When this was all over." He laughed sadly. "I guess that’s not really an option now."

"It depends on what you want to do next." The rabbit said, patting his shoulder. "Those doors over there. You can move on to your reward. You can wait here, and hope he finds his way. Maybe meet some of the other Champions who’ve done their duty. Or maybe, just maybe…you can take a chance, go back out into the multiverse. You found each other once. Maybe somewhere, someplace else in another life, you can find each other again? Your choice."

"…I was never good at waiting. And I sure don’t want a halo and a harp." Shepard shrugged. "Will we remember each other?"

"No. But once you find each other, you’ll feel like you’ve known each other for a lifetime."

"…like I always did with him." Shepard turned to the rabbit. "This isn’t the first time, is it?"

"It never is Champion. It never is." The rabbit said as it opened the door.

~~

Someplace, sometime, someone else: His heart stopped for a moment when he saw those brown eyes, like sunlight through whiskey.

He felt like he’d been waiting a lifetime to meet them.

**Author's Note:**

> I found myself thinking on this N7 day 2013 about Commander Shepard as Moorcock's Eternal Champion. This happened.


End file.
